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July 27, 2013

It is impossible for anyone to be scared of Chucky like children of the early '80s are scared of Chucky. I'm not going to sit here and argue that the killer from the Child's Play series isn't universally creepy, because the idea of a happy-go-lucky looking doll who's a psychotic madman on the inside is pretty timeless. But those of you who didn't watch Saturday morning and/or after school cartoons at the time just don't know why us late '80s kids were so terrified when little Chucky started killing and swearing and being evil. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: My Buddy and Kid Sister.

If you were a kid of the era, the My Buddy/Kid Sister ad was the real world equivalent of the Silver Shamrock ad from Halloween III. That commercial was everywhere kids wanted to be, and the idea of owning a My Buddy doll that would be my best friend in the world was addictive in all the commercially wrong '80s ways. Granted, the advertising was never enough to make me actually GET the My Buddy doll - Transformers and G.I. Joe figures were so much cheaper and awesomer! (Plus, us monster kids lucked out when we got My Pet Monster instead.) - but that didn't mean that I wouldn't see that ad three times an hour for what seemed like a lifetime and freak out about how awesome it would be to have a plush best friend in overalls. Every. Single. Time.

Which brings us to Chucky, and the realization that some sick bastard (in this case, Don Mancini) sat at home one day and said "I'm gonna turn that brainwashing commercial for kids into a giant nightmare" and cackled all the way to a hit horror franchise that has spanned nearly 30 years. Mancini actually has stated that his inspiration for Child's Play came from another doll of the '80s, the Cabbage Patch Kids, but it is still impossible for me to see an image of Chucky and not imagine My Buddy tenaciously chasing me around the house with a knife. (Because, as the jingle says, "wherever I go, heeeeee goes.")

Taking a look at the other side of the coin, you have to wonder how a movie could manage to make My Buddy scary - and the answer is the fantastic talent of Brad Dourif. I've seen Dourif in plenty of movies - both very good and very bad - but I only need two of them to convince myself that he's a talented man. This is obviously one of the two roles that defines him in my eyes, and the other is his turn as one of the patients in the true Hollywood classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It's a simplistic way of looking at things, but I'm convinced that any man who can go from bumbling mental patient with a heart of gold to cold-blooded killer in the body of a doll has to have some pretty incredible range as an actor.

Chucky is remembered as a wisecracking killer, much like Freddy Krueger, and like Krueger's films it's sometimes hard to remember that Chucky was birthed from a pretty serious horror film. There's a bit of humor that comes naturally throughout the movie - a lot of it due to the innocent performance by young Alex Vincent as the child who owns Chucky, a lot of it because it's hard to take a 3 foot doll in overalls too seriously - but Mancini and director/co-writer Tom Holland do good work to keep this film tense and serious. The change in tone for the sequels makes sense - less talent involved would lead to a heavier reliance on the simple charms of a killer doll who spews one-liners - but the original film focuses in on the voodoo origins of the possessed doll and lets the child's mother (Catherine Hicks) and the detective on the case (Chris Sarandon) push the movie forward as a (mostly) serious piece of murderous horror.

I'm not sure Child's Play really stands up as "scary" - I like to think of it as a fun-filled horror film that belongs with the likes of Tremors and Gremlins - but Holland and Mancini's film is consistently entertaining schlock. But the thing that's always pushed Child's Play to a special place in my mind is my memory of being indoctrinated by that darned My Buddy jingle, and I have a somewhat twisted respect for Mancini and company for turning out something like Chucky. One of the great skills any horror storyteller has to have is the ability to take the normal and make the audience reconsider it, and few movies have ever destroyed something peaceful in the name of killing as well as Child's Play does.